New gadget - Toshiba e800

I've been distracted by my new toy for the last week or so.... I bought a Toshiba e800 PDA. The main reason for buying this was the 4" VGA screen, of which I had seen some very impressive screen shots on the Brighthand forums and at the Boston PocketPC Club site.
Toshiba shipped the PDA with this fantastic VGA screen, but only able to run four applications in VGA - all document viewers. Just enough to show you how truly impressive the screen is, and to make it really frustrating that nothing else would run in the higher resolution (except the NetFront browser, which has a special e800 VGA version and is excellent).
Thanks to deez at Brighthand, who has provided us all with a hack to run everything in VGA (at the Brighthand link above). And for free! The best things so far are (click on thumbnails for screen shots):

• huge today screen!
• browsing the internet using NetFront and being able to see more than a postage-stamp sized portion of the screen at any one time
• reading Word documents including tables with Textmaker (replacement Word program for PPC). The screenshots form the Softmaker site are in QVGA - it look so much better in VGA!
• Pocket Informant in VGA. I can actually see my whole weeks' appointments at once! The fonts are scalable so it's all readable
• reading ebooks with uBook, the best PDA ebook reader I have found. It allows you to select the font size and colour and read in landscape format
• taking handwritten notes with Phatpad from the people who make Calligrapher
• reading pdfs using the PPC version of Adobe.

Quite apart from the superb screen, this is a real step-up performance-wise for me. I was previously using my iPAQ 5450, which only had 64MB of memory and was running PPC 2002. The e800 has 128MB of RAM plus 32MB of flash RAM, and runs Windows Mobile 2003. I have all my favourite programs installed, even the ones that take up tons of memory, and I still have 60MB of internal memory free!! What's more, I can run memory heavy programs like RunningVoice GSM at the same time as listening to music and browsing the internet - this was never possible on the iPAQ, as the system just didn't have enough memory and would just freeze.

So I haven't been reading so much for the past few days - my spare time has been eaten up by browsing the Brighthand forums, installing programs, finding pictures to use on te today screen, trasnferring music across, etc, etc.

However, I have had time to read Howard's End - on the PDA in ubook - which I loved. The great thing about uBook is that it lets you make annotations (a bit like MS Reader) but then allows you to browse these annotations separately from the book. Great for making odd notes as I read, then reviewing later on. I'm saving my comments on Howard's End for my great piece on Forster (should i ever get around ot writing it) but for now, I'll just say that it's my favourite to date because it deals with the problem of how to reconcile commerce with art and 'sensitivity'.